October 26th, 2009
UK newspaper Web site hacked; 500,000 job-seekers affected
In what is being described as a “deliberate and sophisticated crime,” the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. says the careers section of its Web site was hacked, exposing sensitive data belonging to about half a million users.
According to a note posted online by the Guardian:
The police remain anxious to keep information about the apparent theft to a minimum, in order not to compromise their investigations, but did agree with us that we could inform those users who may be affected. We stress our regret that this breach has occurred. This is apparently a deliberate and sophisticated crime, of which the Guardian is a victim in addition to some of our users.
It is clear that only a minority of Guardian Jobs users are at risk. Some of the data which appears to have been stolen is up to two years old. We have emailed the approximately half a million users whose data may have been compromised. This is out of the total of 10,328,290 unique users the site has per calendar year.
The USA jobs site (www.guardianjobs.com) has not been affected.
There are no details available on the type of data that was compromised but it’s likely the information includes CVs and resumes from job seekers who registered on the Guardian’s Jobs section.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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